That's a relief, I thought you had gone insane but apparently its just me who had forgotten they had two ethernet ports.

Was the Archer C7 really that bad you couldn't remove any of those TL-WR710N units though?

I personally use two TP-Link TL-WDR3600 to create a 2x2 2.4Ghz WDS repeater link across the road - with two outdoor antenna on my house side. Even with that I struggle to get 30Mbit due to crosstalk with other networks, which obviously gets worse the further you try to beam the signal. I then re-broadcast on 5Ghz and a 2.4Ghz dongle (so its on a different channel). The latter of course can only be done with custom firmware.

Now if all the neighbours would just stop using WiFi (or move to 5Ghz as its very short-range) I would be fine.

The Archer Co was losing the guitar every other week, which also affected the firewall rules configured. To link weren't that helpful stating that the router will kill off processes when on for period of time and the first to go was the guitar interface for configuration.

I still needed a couple of the 710s due to the house and the massive girder going through middle of it.

I see my neighbours 5ghz BT network if sat in certain location within the lounge.

Those are done with OpenWRT 15.05-rc2 on the C7. It is a little unstable on 802.11ac (though slightly better if I swap out the WiFi firmware to a slightly newer version, which is what I did here) but seems okay on 802.11n 5Ghz. On 2.4Ghz I haven't noticed any stability issues at all.

One amusing thing about 802.11ac though on the C7 is I can make the WiiU Gamepad stall like crazy when doing that last test. I guess Nintendo doesn't support DFS and as OpenWRT doesn't yet seem to work with it either, they both are stuck on the same channels. Only happens when I'm maxing it out like the above tests though, fine for normal usage.

I'm not entirely shocked you can still see your neighbors 5Ghz, but like you said only from certain angles as it doesn't really pass through walls very well. As such, you are only likely to have one neighbour interfere whereas 2.4Ghz you have half the damn street.

my smoothwall has been a lot more stable than my Archer C7 was and switching to the wireless AP's around the house is also working fine, just wish had some higher specs ones, but overall they do well for what they are used for

I never used the Archer C7 as a router so can't really comment. I did read that if you left hardware NAT enabled it could be really unstabl on stock though, fine if you disabled it, but that halves the maximum routing speed.

I also moved immediately from stock to OpenWRT as I have my actual router probe all my APs and put the clients in one big table so I can see exactly which client is connected to where and their signal strength/link speed, from a single web page.

It does seem fairly stable now on 802.11ac as long as you put a slightly newer firmware (thats the closed-source Atheros WiFi firmware) on there. Just ordered a cheap single-stream USB AC dongle (now they are finally available) so will test it some more.

DFS is also working on OpenWRT too now so it shouldn't interfere with the WiiU any more, not that I ever use it. It also means I can use the higher channels that have a higher transmit power.